Inventing Ireland (45 page)

Edmund Burke was a telling example, for he confronted Yeats with two irreconcilable theories – the absolute efficiency of the state versus the absolute freedom of the individual. The first, if taken to extreme, led to tyranny; and the second, likewise, to anarchy. Burke, therefore, refused to see politics solely in terms either of the state or the individual, and he attempted to reconcile the conflict by inventing the modern idea of the
nation.
¹⁶
Yeats's essays invoke this tradition, insisting that
the Irish nation must steer a middle course between drab statism and piratical individualism, aligning itself with neither. Such strictures would hardly feature in the encyclopaedia of a fascist.

Moreover, Burke believed that
Locke and his theory of sense-perception ignored the
historical
dimension, the way in which communities were held together by tradition. By submitting all to the test of reason, Locke had ignored the play of historic forces which had helped to shape things. History was more than a succession of self-interested men; and so Yeats supplied a history of Man, viewed from a near-anthropological standpoint, as Swift, Goldsmith and
Berkeley had seen him. These, said Yeats, "found in England the opposite that stung their thought into expression and made it lucid". Berkeley's famous claim that "we Irish do not hold with this" was a denial of the world of Locke and
Newton. "That was the birth
of the
national intellect and it caused the defeat in Berkeley's secret society of English materialism, the Irish Salamis".
¹⁷

What had outraged Berkeley was Locke's repudiation of the primary qualities of weight, mass and so on, as properties objectively belonging
to
things. Locke held that they were mere sensations produced in us by the physical characteristics of things. His assertion that there was "nothing like" the ideas of secondary qualities (colour, taste and so on) "existing in the bodies themselves" dismayed Berkeley, since it seemed to exclude any room for poetry. Berkeley believed that things exist only in so far as we perceive them. Yeats went further to assert that each man or woman creates a purely personal world, as against Locke who claimed that, under standard conditions, each person would see "the same thing".
¹⁸
To Yeats, Blake's well-publicized attacks on the empirical Locke set the republican poet in well-chosen Celtic company, along with Scotland's
David Hume. Yeats was delighted to endorse this revolt by the Celtic fringe. His Berkeley was the man who argued against Locke in his
Treatise on Human Knowledge
(1710) that communication was not the only object of language, but also "the raising of some passion ... the putting of the mind in some particular disposition". Burke in his
Enquiry
also suggested that poetry "does not depend for its effect on the raising of sensible images", for its habit is "to affect by sympathy rather than by imitation".
¹⁹

In the decade following Irish independence, Yeats in his writings aligns himself with these thinkers and argues for innate ideas (birds nesting; girls looking in a certain way at passing boys) rather than the
tabula rasa.
As far as he is concerned, Locke's distinction between primary and secondary ideas took away the world and gave people excrement instead. Berkeley, on the other hand, restored the world,
with his demonstration that all qualities of shape, as well as of colour, depend on the perceiver:

Fragments

I.
Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning jenny
Out of his side.

II.
Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium's mouth,
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of the dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh.
²⁰

If expression precedes conceptualization, that is because Nineveh did not exist until the poets first created it with their sighing. Yeats had written in "The Symbolism of Poetry": "I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation".
²¹
The fear voiced in the poem is of the uniformity and massification of English society, whose members were all (according to Blake) "inter-measurable", or (in Yeats's elaboration) "chopped and measured like a piece of cheese".

To these members of his eighteenth-century pantheon, Yeats added Goldsmith (for his delight in the concrete details of everyday life), Swift (for his love of the Hounynhyms and his hatred of machines), and Burke (for his image of the state as a slow-maturing tree). He was particularly struck by Burke's idea that the radical Jacobins, lacking a vision of evil, oppressed mankind by their excessively high expectations which left "little mercy for the imperfect". No matter how great the energy of the reformer, opined Yeats, a still greater was required to face with equanimity the unreformed and irresponsible elements of life. Deriding communism as just the latest "Santa Claus" of the radical movement, he asserted a preference for a politics of tragic resignation, which meant
resignation to all that was flawed and finally unreformable in the human psyche. "We begin to live when we conceive of life as a tragedy".
²²

Yeats's rather Augustan desire to balance the claims of individual and state, of freedom and necessity, led him to embrace Walt Whitman, the great reconciler of self and mass. Accordingly, he placed this poetic founder in Phase 6 of
A Vision
:

... he used his
Body of Fate
(his interest in crowds, in casual loves and affections, in all summary human experience) to clear intellect of antithetical emotions (always insincere from Phase 1 to Phase 8), and haunted and hunted by the now involuntary
Mask,
created an image of vague, half-civiiized man, all his thought and impulse a product of democratic bonhomie, of schools, of colleges, of public discussion. Abstraction had been born, but it remained the abstraction of a community, of a tradition, a synthesis starting, not as with Phase 19, 20 and 21 with logical deduction from an observed fact, but from the whole experience of the individual or of the community: "I have such and such a feeling. I have such and such a belief . . .
²³

A question remains about all this: how convincing is Yeats's Third Way? How real is his transcendence of the binaries of freedom and necessity at that weird moment when the latter takes fire as the former in the human head? Yeats did not see the world as a thing to be remade, but as an object of contemplation, conceived not for the purpose of reformation so much as revelation. Since that revelation could hardly be enacted socially, it must first of all be internalized within the self.

Mechanistic philosophy had reduced the mind to the quicksilver at the back of the mirror: however, said Yeats, the internalizer of the quest-romance must turn lamp,
becoming in this contemplative moment "predestinate and free, creation's very self". The critic
T. R. Whitaker has construed this phase of Yeats's thought: "in such phrases, he reformulated that alchemical shattering of the objective mirror and distilling of the luminous drop of gold which had concerned him since the time of his apocalyptic romances, and which properly symbolized both the artist's transcendence of the cyclical world and his imaginative growth within the world".
²⁴
A parallel enactment in Act Three of Synge's
The Playboy of the Western World
has Christy Mahon abandoning the mirror of realism as the sign of human vanity and learning to illuminate his roadway by a self-generated inner light. Public opinion of what a man is will never disclose the true self, being rather a
distorting mirror. Yeats finds this out for himself in
"A Dialogue of Self and Soul" when, speaking of "the finished man among his enemies", he asks

How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his
eyes
until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
²⁵

The only answer known to Yeats was that of Mohini Chatterjee, who "taught that all we perceive exists in the external world – this is a stream which is out of human control, and we but a mirror, and our deliverance consists in turning the mirror away so that it reflects nothing".
²⁶
Mirror-historians can only chronicle a world of accumulated facts; but in "Dove or Swan?" Yeats reanimates history as a force taking fire as symbolic pattern in the human head. Such a moment follows an act of attention or contemplation elsewhere described by Yeats as a form of self-conquest: his stylistic version of revolution.
Style
was his Third Way beyond action and contemplation; artistic living his Third Way transcending freedom and necessity; metaphor his way of holding in a single moment reality and justice. If Part One of
A Vision –
like the opening half of "Easter 1916" – devoted itself to an account of the metaphorizing imagination, then Part Two, like the second half of the poem, represented a relentless demetaphorization.

This answers one of the stock objections to
A Vision
: how can such an abstract system come from so noted a hater of abstraction? But there is a still further complaint that is often made: if each value is cancelled by a counter-value, are we not left with a self-destructive, nugatory scepticism? In actual practice, the opposed values are not
exactly
balanced, since the system is so manipulated as to favour the antithetical Celtic over the primary English elements:

A
primary
dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an
antithetical
dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. The approaching
antithetical
influx and that particular
antithetical
dispensation for which the intellectual has begun will reach its complete systematization at that moment when, as I have already shown, the Great Year comes to its intellectual climax.
²⁷

Nor do the opposed values cancel one another out, since they remain vibrating in a sort of dynamic equilibrium, which itself constitutes a Third Way, more vital for the nonce than either between which it arises. The history of the Anglo-Irish is telescoped into these following sentences from
A Vision:

When I look in history for the conflict or union of
antithetical
and
primary,
I seem to discover that conflict or union of races stated by
Petrie and Schneider as universal law. A people who have lived apart and so acquired unity of custom and purity of breed unite with some other people through migration, immigration or conquest. A race (the new
antithetical)
emerges that is neither the one nor the other, and often after somewhere about 500 years it produces, or so it seems, its particular culture or civilization. This culture lives only in certain victorious classes; then comes a period of revolution (phase 22) terminated by a civilization of policemen, schoolmasters, manufacturers, philanthropists, a second soon exhausted blossoming of the race . . .
²⁸

Far from offering a deconstructive nihilism,
A Vision
envisages Ireland as an imagined community. It also allows that the fiction is forever self-interrogating, a capacity all the more crucial at a time when many apologists for the Irish Free State suffer from single vision and from Newton's sleep.

Joyce's
Ulysses
is often treated as a definitive account of the mind of modern Europe in 1922, the year of its publication: but, for that very reason, it is also a recognition that Europe of itself was nothing without its colonial holdings.
Ulysses
is one of the first major literary utterances in the modern period by an artist who spoke for a newly-liberated people. The former provost of Trinity College Dublin, J. P. Mahaffy, clearly sensed Joyce's disruptive power when he lamented that his publications proved beyond doubt that "it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of the island, for the corner-boys who spit into the Liffey".
¹
That use of the word
aborigines
captures a central truth about James Joyce: outcast from Ireland, scornful of Britain, and uneasy about the humanism of a Europe to which he could never fully surrender, he became instead a nomad, a world author.

Virtually alone among the great post-colonial writers, he did not head for the imperial city or for the lush landscapes of the parent country: for him, there would be no Naipaulian "enigma of arrival", no pained discovery that the culture to which he had been assimilated lacked, after all, a centre. He took this as understood from the start and cut himself adrift from all cosy moorings: it was his strange destiny to be a central figure in world literature, and yet somehow tangential to the cultural life of both Ireland and England. Though he jokingly saw himself as the most recent of the
Wild Geese –
those Irish rebels who sought training in the armies of Catholic Europe after 1691 in hopes of returning to expel the occupier – he was, in truth, a sort of migratory
gastarbeiter
from a peripheral country with a chronically depressed economy.

Like many migrants in the decades since, Joyce performed in central Europe his own research and field work, his own reverse anthropology,
²
while perpetually fretting that the homeland he had abandoned was
about to disappear. "If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake", he wrote in 1907, "or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever".
³
The migrant intellectual is forever assailed by the feeling that he or she is speaking before a tribunal, and so it was with
Joyce. He tried in journalistic articles to convey to the developed world something of his people's desolation. He had no great faith that his meaning would be understood. Adopting, for strategic purposes, the urbane tone of a central European, he described a bizarre and unjust murder-trial of a speechless defendant back in Ireland. "The figure of this dumbfounded old man, a remnant of a civilization not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge", he told his Triestine readers, "is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion".
⁴

That old prisoner's problem was a version of his own: how to express the sheer fluidity and instability of Irish experience in a form which would be nonetheless comprehensible to the arbiters of international order. Ireland was indeed a precarious invention, a fiction which might yet be sufficiently imagined to become a fact: but in 1907 its people were estranged from the past, a nation of exiles and migrants, caught on the cusp between tradition and innovation. They were in but not of any situation in which they might find themselves, their reality the experience of perpetually crossing over from one code to another. The shortest way to Tara, the ancient centre of Celtic civilization, was indeed through Holyhead, that clearing-house for exiles
en route
to the cities of England and continental Europe. Yet into his own exile Joyce took with him the ancient Gaelic notion that only in literature can the consciousness of a people be glimpsed.

There were so many different levels of national experience to comprehend: and yet there was available to Joyce no overarching central image, no single explanatory category, no internal source of authority. Too mobile, too adaptable, the Irish were everywhere and nowhere, scattered across the earth and yet feeling like strangers in their own land. The fear which gripped Pearse, MacDonagh and Desmond FitzGerald in 1914 – that a great historic nation was about to disappear as tens of thousands of its men went willingly to the slaughter of another country's war – had also assailed Joyce. He began
Ulysses
in the hope of discovering through it a form adequate to this strange experience, one which might allow him eventually to proclaim the tables of a new law in the language of the outlaw, to burrow down into his own "Third World" of the mind. For an audience in the made world, he wished
to
evoke a world still in the making.

He was, in that sense, one of those migrants who create newness out
of the mutations of the old. The novel in the hands of a Rushdie or a Naipaul has come to be seen as a form through which the members of an educated native élite address their former masters: but, decades before they wrote, Joyce had used prose narrative to capture the jokes, oral traditions and oratory of a people, who might never have committed these to print themselves, unless they had been part of a more achieved, self-confident culture. Though
Ulysses
is indeed the collective utterance of a community, it is hard to imagine anyone within the world of the book (except possibly Stephen) actually writing it all down. "I have put the great talkers of Dublin into my book", boasted Joyce, "they – and the things that they forgot".
⁵
For all that, there will be few to imagine either a Leopold or Molly Bloom
reading
it, which makes it in this respect too a supreme instance of the post-colonial text.

Yet these characters are in no way unmodern or unsophisticated. Joyce set his book in the "centre of paralysis" that was Dublin in 1904, in the conviction that if he could get to the dead heart of that city, he could render the discontents and estrangements of the
modern world. As an Irishman, he could never condone the glib assumption that "undeveloped" countries like his own were like the developed ones at an earlier stage of their growth: not for him the easy evolutionism of
Darwin or Marx. Joyce was radical enough in
Ulysses
to present Mr. Deasy's optimistic Christianity and the socialist's vision of a classless society as two sides of the same oppressive coin. He knew better than that. He knew from personal experience that to be modern is to experience perpetual disintegration and renewal, and yet somehow to make a home in that disorder. The Irish, through the later nineteenth century, had become one of the most deracinated of peoples; robbed of belief in their own future, losing their native language, overcome by feelings of
anomie
and indifference, they seemed rudderless and doomed. Though
Ulysses
is set on a day in 1904, it is necessarily a portrait of the late-Victorian Ireland which went into its making and, as such, a remarkable outline of colonial torpor.

What had happened in Ireland was what would happen across the world in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century: traditional patterns of living had been gravely disrupted, but without the material compensations which elsewhere helped to make such losses tolerable. The people were suffering from that most modern of ailments: a homeless mind. Their small but persistent hope was that somehow they might yet manage to modernize in a human mode and put an end to the loss of meaning which was all they knew. Very few of them nursed regressive dreams of a return to the past, but they did yearn for
a more bearable version of modernity. Against that backdrop, both the 1916 Rising
and
Ulysses
can be interpreted in rather similar ways: as attempts to achieve, in the areas of politics and literature, the blessings
of
modernity
and
the liquidation
of
its
costs.
In other words, the Irish wished to be modern and counter-modern in one and the same gesture.

By the time that Joyce began writing
Ulysses
in 1914, most of the industrial world, and not just its colonial outposts, was overcome by a sense of
anomie.
indeed, the
Great War was proposed by many as a heroic alternative to such meaninglessness. Joyce's project of recounting "the dailiest day possible" takes on a radical significance in that context: he wished to reassert the dignity of the quotidian round, to reclaim the everyday as a primary aspect of experience. But this was in no way intended as a surrender to that colonial life which had been evoked so unerringly in
Dubliners.
There Joyce had described an Ireland filled with echoes and shadows, a place of copied and derived gestures, whose denizens were turned outward to serve a distant source of authority in London. Such a collection of prentice stories would be written in later decades by many another member of an emerging national élite ashamed of his or her colonial setting, and taking bitter consolation in an ability to render all the futility with a wicked precision. Writing it all down may well have been Joyce's personal alternative to acts of political violence, his way of seizing power.

Each of the stories in
Dubliners
chronicles an abortive attempt at freedom, an attempt which is doomed precisely because it couches itself in the forms and languages of the enemy; and this becomes a prophecy of the failure of a nationalism which would insist on confining its definitions to the categories designed by the colonizer.

Each narrative in
Dubliners
tells a similar tale, of an impulse arrested or else enacted to a point where it becomes self-negating: in either case, the gesture of revolt is fated always to have the old, familiar tyranny inscribed in it.

The
short-story genre promised Joyce an escape, a line of flight from the formal inappropriateness of the novel, which was calibrated to a settled society rather than one still in the settling. But the escape-route which it offered Joyce proved just as illusory, just as self-defeating as that which beckoned and then frustrated his characters. When he had finished the stories, he was rewarded by no sense of difficulties overcome: though they are bound together by themes, symbols, even characters, the collection does not quite become a novel. Each story moves to an epiphanic revelation of an impasse, a paralysis which marks its termination, because if it were to proceed any further it
would exfoliate into a much more extensive and unlimited type of narrative: the process which was allowed to happen just once when "Mr. Hunters Day" became
Ulysses.
Latent in
Ulysses
was this vast and multi-faceted assemblage: as Yeats shrewdly observed, the stories contained the promise of a novelist of a new kind.
⁶
However, their author was at that early stage no more able than his characters to fit that narrative together. All he could work with were shreds and patches, assembled to no clear overall purpose other than the revelation of such fragmentation to its victims. As Deleuze and Guattari were to write in a somewhat similar context of
Kafka's stories: "never has so complete an
oeuvre
been made from movements that are always aborted, yet always in communication with each other".
⁷

The style in which the stories of
Dubliners
was written was one of famished banality, whereby
Joyce found his own appropriate level of linguistic under-development, taking Hiberno-English in its post-famine, post-Gaelic disorder to a degree of "scrupulous meanness".
⁸
Irish was for him no longer a feasible literary medium, but a means whereby his people had managed to reshape English, to a point where their artists could know the exhilaration of feeling estranged from
all
official languages. Joyce never felt tempted to try to write in Irish, and he affected to scorn its senile folk narratives on which no individual mind had ever been able to draw out a line of personal beauty: but deeper than the disdain went a kind of fear, a sense of shared trauma at the loss, in most parts of Ireland through the nineteenth century, of the native language.

The fate of a sullen peasantry left floundering between two official languages,
Irish and English, haunts the diary entries by Stephen Daedalus in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
:

John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short pipe. Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English.
⁹

Joyce there mocks the widespread hopes of a language revival, of opening the lines of communication to a Gaelic past: but it is obvious from
A Portrait
that neither was he fully happy with
the
English-speaking Ireland of the present. Though the old peasant might struggle to recall a few phrases of Irish for the Gaelic Leaguer's notebook, the truth (as Joyce saw it) was that English did not provide a comprehensive
expressive medium for Irish people either. That is part of the tragicomedy of non-communication pondered by Stephen Daedalus during a conversation with the Englishman who is dean of studies at his university:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words
home, Christ, ale, master,
on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
¹⁰

The death of language takes many forms besides fatigued cliché, and one of them – in Ireland, at any rate – was the loss of the native tongue.

The moment when Joyce wrote in English, he felt himself performing a humiliating translation of a split linguistic choice. In his writings, he seeks to express that sundering; and, eventually, in
Finnegans Wake
he would weave the absent texts in the space between standard Irish and standard English. But in the passage just quoted, he posits a harassment of the Irish student's emotional nature by the Englishman's intellectual culture. On such a subject, Joyce was resolutely conservative. He knew that the colonial education system offered Irish children an alien medium through which to view their native realities. To interpret those realities through literary forms which were alien to them would serve only to make the people seem even more unknown and unknowable. Hence Stephen's unrest of spirit.